I always note references to 'the loss of the family unit' because most are referring to the Industrial Age father, mother and 2.5 kids. What they don't acknowledge is that it was industry that actively promoted this arrangement over the more extensive Agricultural Age family, or that it has been a spectacular failure.

That said, contemporary Western society is moving toward more isolation of individuals, less stability in the home, and less economic security. The nuclear family is stronger than what is devolving, just as the small agricultural community with its grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc. was stronger in many ways than the nuclear family that devolved from it.

The weakness of Christianity and the West is not in its numbers, and is exactly the same as that of Islam. Neither are evidence based and both use religion as a justification instead of a personal refuge. Changes in material circumstance, technology and political organization mean that the cultural significance of these and other religions has little to do with the current human condtition.

So what if Muslims outnumber Catholics? All it means is that in the West there is a growing trend toward rejecting religion as a justification for public policy. But risk lurks in the overthrow of constraints.

In the West, older family structures were and are constraining to individual behavior; not always a bad thing. In the Muslim world religious constraints on hatred and violence are rapidly being reinterpreted to suit a view of the West's freedom and lack of constraint as immoral and worthy of destruction.

This extremist view must be opposed, but pining for a return to 'old time religion,' whether Christian or Islamic is the problem, not the solution or any part of the solution.

Second, I am growing more and more concerned by the sentiment of people like this author. After decades of anti-catholic sentiment in the nation that wasn't finally ended, in my opinion, until JFK became the first catholic president, I relate to religious persecution in the one nation on earth that prides itself on the principles of religious freedom and tolerance from a Constitutional point of view. From the founding of the nation until recent times, millions of immigrants have come here for the expressed purpose of escaping religious persecution: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike have come here to be able to practice their religions without government intervention. There are many people that say that the fall of the Soviet Union was directly linked to their governmental attempts to suppress religious freedom. How many Russian Jews came to the USA to be free from all that? Likewise, there are millions of American Muslims who immigrated to the USA to be free of their totalitarian governments. Neither of these two groups of immigrants wants to force their beliefs or their religious laws onto Christians. Ironically, both of these two Abrahamic religions (of which there are three: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) prohibit prosteltyzing--whereas Christianity is known for it. There are no Islamic or Judaic lobby groups out there working to control the outcome of the US Presidential election to ensure that their religious agenda in the USA will become law--if that was too veiled I'll be specific. The Christians and Catholics are working very, very hard to make abortion an issue in this election going so far as to call Senator Obama a "baby killer"--quote from protester signs that were in full force in Pueblo on Monday. They want to make their religious principles into law. The are fervent in their approach to spreading their religious values to others. The only people on the planet that are Muslims or Jews got to be that way by being prostelyzed by missionaries who set out on missions to covert the world to Christianity. So, the paranoid statements of this author and the headline are just that, pure paranoia.

As a Catholic man, I would say also, that unfortunately, I've done a great deal of study on world religions, and I served as both a lay instructor on them at a Bible College in the Midwest for 25 years. I've got to tell you, dear author, and anyone else who is a God-Fearing Catholic or Christian for that matter, that the media has it all wrong on Islam, as do the paranoid but all too active bloggers on this topic. No, I am not planning to convert my faith any time soon. But, and this is a huge but, it is as important to understand Islam as it is to understand Christianity and Judaism as I mentioned our fellow Abrahamic faiths. They share, like it or not, believe it or not, the precisely the same foundation. All three were born of the same general locale in the world with Judaism being the oldest! Something a lot of Christians forget. LIkewise, they don't seem to know that Islam is the newest, but that it's still ancient in our time frame. And, while, it's difficult for anyone to admit, there are things we need to know. We need to know, as Catholics and Christians, that the holy book of Islam contains way too much overlap and similarity to our human corrupted Bible and that, in fact, the Islamic holy book called the Qur'an often spelled Koran (you can spell it however you want because it's an Arabic world which used entirely different letters, just like we called Beijing, Peking, when I was a kid) was delivered and memorized in miraculous fashion by the Arch Angel Gabriel to Muhammad who was illiterate. He memorized God's exact words and they were then written down letter perfectly and approved by God as God's word. The only other thing we human posses that we know to be God's word are the Ten Commandments delivered by God to Moses. The rest of the Bible is a collection of stories and ideas written by humans to teach us what God wanted via extrapolation and inference from the stories of the Old Testament, Jesus, and other prophets sent by God to teach us right from wrong. We Catholics and Christians in general claim to want to live our lives according to the laws of God. Is it lot on us that we don't work on Sunday because it is our day of worship? Well, anyway, my point is that when you study the history and the theology, you learn, something unsettling. You learn that, in fact, according the Qur'an, which there is no reason not to believe it is the word of God any more or less than the Bible is thought to be, and it's kind of odd to say, "Well, no, I don't think that's the word of God even if God said it was His word" because you don't want to; that, in fact, in writing the Bible, we mere humans got a lot of things wrong. Which, given that we are mere humans, isn't that surprising that we might have gotten some things wrong. And, it's not surprising that if we got some of God's words wrong, he'd send another messenger to give us one last chance at getting things right. Is it? I mean think about it. If you were God and your people were running around not listening to you after you sent them 1000s of messengers most of whom were not only not listened to, they were killed, that you might lose hope and then before moving on you sent one last message with your final word? It's not hard at all for me to believe this is true. But, it was only when I sat down with the Qur'an, me the little Catholic kid from Nebraska, and began to study and read it, that I realized some very important things. The overlap between the Qur'an and the Bible are stunning. There is no way in my expert opinion that this could be coincidence. God has been sending us the same basic message for over 2000 years. God, for example, doesn't want us killing each other. Ever. Not for any reason. The only suitable exception is that we may kill each other if attacked first. Of course, the irony is that attacking isn't allowed any more than killing, so if we all followed God's will, there would never be any killing, ever. It would be impossible. And yet, we still kill. Our government has authorized the killing of thousands most recently in Iraq. And, since we were the attackers, well, then. They did NOT attack us first. When we went into Iraq the first time, they had attacked Kuwait, but this time, they had not done anything to us, and the evidence shows that all of the stuff we were told to justify it pre-emptively was erroneous lies that, I'm guessing now that the Democratic Congress has chosen to chicken out and not impeach the President, he will have to answer to God in the end--I'm also guessing that God's probably not going to judge him well, though what do I know, I'm just a mere human trying to learn from the holy books how to live my life. My point is that when you study the actual texts, you will discover that the Qur'an goes back, fills in gaps, corrects some misconceptions--for example, the Qur'an says that it was not Eve who tempted Adam into eating the forbidden fruit therefore placing the blame of original sin on women, rather they were both equally tempted by Satan. Well, wow, that was liberating to me. There are many other examples I won't go into here, I would just urge everyone to get to understand this holy book first.

Now, just as with the Bible, there are many Christian religions that sprouted up with their own interpretations, there are actually over a billion interpretations of the Qur'an because unlike the Christian-based religions, the Qur'an suggests that each individual son or daughter of God must read and interpret the words for him or herself. There are no holy men who preach and have some direct tie to God. That is why there are not equivalents to priests or ministers in Islam. For you see, Islam is the religion which evolved after the delivery of the Qur'an where people began to attempt to actually follow the true and final word of God, however successfully or unsuccessfully is only for God, not you or I to judge. And the religion of Islam however perfect or imperfect is no less valid than the little people immediately trying to live their lives according to the model left by Jesus after the Crucifixtion. No? Of course, as is the nature of humankind, we tend to go with our own interpretations of things anyway, so God giving us permission and the expectation to do so is pretty powerful, but so is the idea that we must read and interpret and then only be judged by God. I'm going to make a bold statement here that any God-Fearing Christian who hasn't read the Qur'an is out on a limb with God because you cannot claim to be living God's way, speaking God's will, and so on, if you haven't read HIs final word. Once you do that, though, you need to be prepared to see Muslims in a new way. You will not longer be able to see the stereotypes of the media and the Middle East cartoonists. Because you will learn that, in fact, according to God, all people are Muslim because all being Muslim means is that you submit to the will of God. What good Catholic or Christian does not submit to the will of God? Isn't that our collective purpose. So, from this perspective, and if you know any Muslims you can ask them if you don't believe me, any person that believes in God, not Gods, is your brother or sister. They are family automatically. And, therefore, you cannot commit acts of hate or war against them. The Muslims do not perceive the Christians and the Jews as beneath them in any way. They might wonder why they don't choose to follow the most recent update from God much like one might not understand a neighbor riding around in a horse and carriage when a car is so much more convenient. But, they do not hate us, they do not wish us ill, they do not want to take over the world or any such things like that. Of course, they do not like Christians telling them that they should be Christian. Which, kind of makes sense doesn't it. Because it says in the Qur'an that it is sinful to try to convert people to Islam. That people will or won't submit to the will of God at their own free will and at their own choice of peril. Given that a Muslim has submitted to the will of God by nature, it would make no sense to try to convert him or her to Christianity. And the idea of the "trying to convert" part is considered sinful. Now, here is where we can get into a dicey area then that serves as an illustrative case for us. If I believe and the most recent word of God delivered to humankind supports this, that trying to convert me to your religion is a sin, and you don't stop, and you do everything you can to try, of what logical opinion am I to draw? Maybe that you are a willful sinner, inexperienced in God's word, and that I don't want to be around you or like you much. Moreover, if you go so far as to say I'm a blood thirsty evil person trying to take over the world with my radical Islam, what am I going to think?

No, I'm going to ask again for every Christian to actually read the Qur'an. It's not that long. You can do it. Read it in historical perspective as the word of God having been delivered by Gabriel. You will be stunned to read ideas and notions that are so familiar to you. You will see that we didn't actually get it that wrong when we worked on the Bible. And then you will see any Muslim person and Islam very differently. You will see that Muslims are not to be feared any more than Jews or Christians. You will see that all humans are flawed and barely capable of being servants of our Lord. You must also acknowledge that there have been many, many misguided movements within all major religions when bad people in the group made decisions that are actually against God's holy word. And you, hopefully, will realize that we need not fear Muslims any more than we fear our Christian neighbors. What we must fear is ignorance of God's word.

Thank you for taking the time to post, Dante. It is very well articulated, and it's apparent you know a lot more about this subject than the fear-peddling author of the blog post. I hope people take the time to read it and heed your advice.

Dante 45, I agree that the article we're commenting on represents paranoia, and on the importance of understanding Islam as well as Christianity. But for a teacher, you have put some real bloopers into your comments!

Dante45 wrote:The only people on the planet that are Muslims or Jews got to be that way by being prostelyzed by missionaries who set out on missions to covert the world to Christianity.

There is no point romanticizing the issue - people most often choose their religion at the point of a sword. This is as true of Christianity as of Islam.

Dante45 wrote:(The Koran)...was delivered and memorized in miraculous fashion by the Arch Angel Gabriel to Muhammad who was illiterate. He memorized God's exact words and they were then written down letter perfectly and approved by God as God's word. The only other thing we human posses that we know to be God's word are the Ten Commandments delivered by God to Moses.

Quoting The Columbia History of the World: "Except for the prohibition of the worship of other gods and the interdiction of idolotry, the Ten Commandments had been repeatedly prescribed in teaching - and broken in practice - ages before Moses."

When the illiterate claim the work of generations as unprecedented divine revelation, the trouble begins...

Dante45 wrote:--for example, the Qur'an says that it was not Eve who tempted Adam into eating the forbidden fruit therefore placing the blame of original sin on women, rather they were both equally tempted by Satan. Well, wow, that was liberating to me.

It is a popular ruse to state that women's rights are included in the Koran and Christianity, but just as the early Christian church was maintained by women whose efforts were discarded by conquerors, the real effects of these ideologies are clear enough, especially in fundamentalist areas.

Dante45 wrote:There are no holy men who preach and have some direct tie to God. That is why there are not equivalents to priests or ministers in Islam.

If there are caves like the ones in Tora Bora in the Midwest where Christians hang out, you must be living in one! Check out the Imams, Ayatollahs and the Jihadist martyrs who are so devoted to Allah that their lives mean nothing to them!

Dante45 wrote:Of course, as is the nature of humankind, we tend to go with our own interpretations of things anyway, so God giving us permission and the expectation to do so is pretty powerful...

Powerful indeed. As you say above there is a different interpretation of 'God's word' for everyone who uses it to justify their actions for ill or for good. Why rely on literature instead of the information from our senses for justification when the result of that is almost completely random?

Dante45 wrote:What good Catholic or Christian does not submit to the will of God? Isn't that our collective purpose. So, from this perspective, and if you know any Muslims you can ask them if you don't believe me, any person that believes in God, not Gods, is your brother or sister.

Your key phrase here is "not Gods." Catholic doctrine insists on the "Triune God" and most other Christian denominations take their cues from that. This is the major source of ideological conflict between Christians and the other Abrahamic religions and is used as the bedrock justification for Muslim hatred of the West! On this point, we are considered blasphemers and infidels, filth to be destroyed.

Dante45 wrote:You will see that all humans are flawed and barely capable of being servants of our Lord. You must also acknowledge that there have been many, many misguided movements within all major religions when bad people in the group made decisions that are actually against God's holy word. And you, hopefully, will realize that we need not fear Muslims any more than we fear our Christian neighbors. What we must fear is ignorance of God's word.

Here is the penultimate problem: This view that humans are flawed, unworthy, servants, and especially that this life is somehow of lesser importance than whatever fantasy is supposed to compensate for its being made miserable by unreason.

What we must fear most of all is the use of God's word as justification for ignorant acts. Chief among those are the refusal to recognize our common humanity, the essentially personal nature of faith and that the word of god is inscrutable.

"No offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed." --Clarence Darrow (quoted in Irving Stone's Clarence Darrow for the Defense, p.83)